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Terminology

2205 terms, tools, patterns and metrics an architect is expected to use precisely. Each one gets a short explanation of what it is, and — where it matters — what it is commonly confused with. Search filters as you type; the column headers sort.

All areas2205 Architecture Fundamentals77 Distributed Systems107 Data Architecture110 Cloud Architecture94 Networking88 API & Integration Architecture82 Reliability & Resilience75 Observability70 Performance & Capacity Engineering72 Security Architecture86 Cost Architecture & FinOps71 Business Architecture67 Architecture Communication67 Enterprise Architecture66 Legacy Modernization71 AI-Era Architecture69 Software Architecture & Engineering71 Architecture Patterns71 Architecture Decision-Making63 The Architect's Meta-Skills61 Delivery & Release Engineering66 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience70 Testing & Quality Architecture66 Data Platform Architecture64 Streaming & Real-Time Data69 Data Governance & Semantics69 Frontend & Experience Architecture66 Edge, Mobile & IoT68 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture65 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk64
Kind Any concept794 practice734 pattern368 metric125 case-study77 tool62 protocol45

2205 terms shown.

Term Kind Topic What it is
Rate Limiting in Practice Throttling, Quota Enforcement pattern Rate Limiting Bounding how much work one caller can demand, the algorithm choice that shows through to users, and why distributed enforcement is approximate.
Re-architect vs Rebuild concept Legacy Modernization Restructuring an existing system incrementally versus writing a replacement from scratch — and the strong evidence that incremental wins.
Re-Identification Risk concept Pseudonymisation The probability that pseudonymised data can be linked back to individuals, which is what keeps such data within the scope of data protection law.
Reachability Triage Exploitability Prioritisation, Vulnerability Relevance practice Supply Chain Security Prioritising dependency vulnerabilities by whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable and exploitable in your application, rather than by severity score - which is what makes vulnerability manageme…
Reactive Streams protocol Backpressure & Flow Control A specification for asynchronous stream processing in which the consumer requests a specific number of items, making backpressure part of the protocol rather than an afterthought.
Read Local Write Global pattern Edge Data Consistency Replicating read-only state to every edge location while directing writes to a single authoritative region, which is the arrangement most edge data stores actually provide.
Read Model Query Model, Projection Store pattern CQRS A data structure shaped for a specific query rather than for the domain, maintained separately from the write model.
Read Model Projection pattern CQRS A denormalised store built and maintained from write-side events specifically to serve one query shape efficiently.
Read Replica pattern Data Architecture A copy of a database that receives changes from the primary and serves read-only queries, spreading read load.
Read Timeout Socket Timeout concept Timeouts & Deadlines The bound on how long a client waits for response data after a connection is established — distinct from the connect timeout, and the one that usually matters.
Read-First Extraction Reads Before Writes, Reversible Extraction Order pattern Strangler Fig Extracting a service's read path before its write path, because a wrong read migration is a flag flip while a wrong write migration is a data reconciliation exercise.
Read-Your-Writes Consistency Read-After-Write concept Consistency Models A guarantee that a client always sees its own prior writes, even in a system that is otherwise eventually consistent.
Real User Monitoring RUM tool Real User Monitoring Telemetry collected from actual browser sessions, capturing what real users on real devices and networks experienced.
Real-Time Analytics Store OLAP Serving Layer tool Real-Time Analytical Stores A database built for sub-second aggregate queries over freshly ingested data at high concurrency, serving user-facing analytics rather than internal reporting.
Real-Time Serving Layer pattern Real-Time Serving Layer The read path that answers queries in milliseconds from precomputed or continuously updated state — where the design question is what to compute when.
Rearchitecture Threshold concept Refactoring & Re-architecting The conditions under which rebuilding a system is justified, given that it is the most expensive treatment and is chosen far more often than it is warranted.
Reasoning Under Uncertainty practice Judgement Under Uncertainty Making decisions with incomplete information — by classifying the uncertainty, buying information cheaply, and preferring reversible moves.
Rebalance Cost Partition Reassignment Duration, State Restore Time concept Stateful Stream Processing The time a stateful consumer group is unavailable while partitions are reassigned and state restored - proportional to state size, incurred on every deployment, and invisible in throughput and lag metrics.
Reclamation Notice Window Interruption Notice, Preemption Warning concept Spot & Interruptible Capacity The seconds between a provider announcing it is taking an instance back and actually taking it, which sets a hard upper bound on how much work a shutdown handler can finish and therefore how large a unit of wo…
Reconciliation Loop pattern GitOps A controller that continuously compares declared state with actual state and acts to close the gap, replacing deployment as an event with convergence as a property.
Reconnect Storm Thundering Herd on Reconnect, Connection Stampede, Recovery Amplification concept WebSockets & Realtime The synchronised burst of clients re-establishing connections after a disruption, which is far more expensive than steady-state traffic and routinely turns a brief network fault into a prolonged self-sustainin…
Reconnect Storm Connection Stampede concept Distributed Systems The synchronised reconnection of a large population of clients after a disruption, which routinely causes a larger outage than the disruption itself.
Recorded Assumption Named Assumption with Trigger, Invisible-to-Monitored practice Deciding Under Uncertainty Writing down the assumption a decision rests on, with the condition that would invalidate it - which converts an invisible dependency into a monitored one.
Recorded Interaction Corpus Traffic-Recorded Fixtures, Captured Interaction Set practice Service Virtualisation A set of real request and response pairs captured from a live dependency and used to build and continuously re-verify its stand-in, so the fake reproduces evidence rather than the author's assumptions.
Records Retention and Legal Hold practice Records Retention & Legal Hold The obligation to keep specified records for a defined period, and to suspend all deletion for material relevant to anticipated litigation.
Recovery Cost Per Unit Remediation Cost, Recoverability, Time-to-Repair Per Node concept Fault Isolation The effort required to restore one affected instance, device or tenant - the multiplier that decides whether a wide blast radius is an incident or a catastrophe, and the factor most often left out of risk asse…
Recovery Load Restoration Surge, Post-Incident Backlog, Catch-Up Traffic concept Rollback & Forward Fix The traffic generated by a system returning to service - reconnections, queued work, cold caches, retries - which is qualitatively different from steady-state load and routinely turns a short incident into a l…
Recovery Point Objective RPO metric RTO & RPO The maximum acceptable data loss measured as a duration, determining the replication and backup strategy.
Recovery Time Objective RTO metric RTO & RPO The maximum acceptable duration between a failure and restored service, agreed with the business rather than chosen by engineering.
RED Method practice Observability A minimal per-service dashboard: Rate, Errors, Duration — the request-centric view of whether users are being served.
Red Teaming a Model practice Model Evaluation & Red-Teaming Adversarial testing of a model or AI system to find inputs that produce harmful, incorrect or policy-violating outputs before users do.
Redlock protocol Distributed Locking An algorithm for distributed locking across independent Redis instances, and the subject of a well-known critique about what locks can guarantee at all.
Redundancy concept Redundancy Multiple instances of a component so that one failing does not fail the system — valuable exactly to the extent the failures are uncorrelated.
Refactor and Re-architect practice Refactoring & Re-architecting Changing the application's structure — the most expensive migration strategy, justified only where the structure itself is the constraint.
Refactoring practice Software Architecture Changing the internal structure of code without changing its external behaviour, in small verified steps.
Refactoring Under Test practice Refactoring Changing internal structure without changing behaviour, with tests as the mechanism that makes the claim verifiable.
Reference Architecture practice Enterprise Architecture A pre-approved, documented template for a recurring class of solution, so that similar problems do not get individually redesigned.
Reference Architecture concept Reference Architectures A pre-decided template for a recurring class of solution, capturing the decisions that do not need making again.
Reference Call Practitioner Call, Production Reference Check practice Research & Evaluation A structured conversation with an engineer running the technology in production at your scale, which is the only evidence source that reveals operability, upgrade pain and vendor behaviour before you commit.
Reference Data concept Reference Data The slowly-changing shared vocabularies — country codes, currencies, product categories, tax rates — whose inconsistency causes disproportionate trouble.
Reference Data Drift Code List Divergence, Static Data Staleness concept Data Migration Strategies The divergence between a source system's lookup tables and the copy taken at the start of a long migration, which turns into silent transaction rejections in the new system months later.
Reference Implementation practice Reference Architectures A working example of a reference architecture that teams can run, read and copy, as opposed to a document describing one.
Reference Model Reference Architecture concept Reference Models A shared conceptual frame — layers, tiers, viewpoints, capability maps — that gives a conversation vocabulary, and whose limits are frequently forgotten.
Reference Model Tailoring Tailoring Record, Reference Architecture Subsetting practice Reference Models Recording which elements of an adopted reference model you kept, replaced or dropped and why, so a deliberately smaller architecture stays defensible instead of reading as non-compliance.
Referentially Consistent Subset Database Subsetting, Coherent Test Slice practice Test Data Management A small extract of a production-shaped database in which every referenced row is present, so a test suite runs against realistic structure at a size that fits an ephemeral per-change environment.
Refresh Token concept Tokens & JWTs A long-lived credential used solely to obtain new short-lived access tokens, so sessions can persist without long-lived access tokens circulating.
Region Selection Criteria practice Single vs Multi-Region The factors determining where workloads run, in which data residency and latency usually dominate cost.
Region Strategy practice Single vs Multi-Region How many regions, where, and in what topology — driven by residency, latency and availability requirements rather than by ambition.
Regional Evacuation Region Failover Drill practice Multi-Region Architecture The deliberate, rehearsed act of shifting all traffic out of a region — treated as a routine operation rather than an emergency procedure.
Register of Information ICT Third-Party Register, Contractual Arrangements Register practice Sector Cloud Rules A maintained record of every contractual arrangement with a technology provider, including its subcontractors and which critical functions it supports, which converts supplier dependency from a question requir…
Regulatory Architecture concept Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture Designing so regulatory obligations are properties of the system rather than commitments the organisation makes on its behalf.
Regulatory Constraint concept Business Architecture A legal requirement that removes design options — and one that must be established early, because it is not negotiable and is expensive to retrofit.
Regulatory Constraint as Architectural Driver concept Regulatory Constraints A compliance obligation that removes design options entirely, and therefore belongs among the first constraints identified rather than checked at the end.
Regulatory Reporting Pipeline concept Regulatory Reporting Pipelines A data pipeline whose output goes to a regulator, where correctness, reproducibility and demonstrable lineage matter more than latency or elegance.
Rehost Lift and Shift practice Rehosting Moving a workload to new infrastructure with no change to the application — fastest, cheapest to execute, and the source of the bill that discredits migrations.
Rejected-Option Record ADR Alternatives Section, Why Not X practice Writing Decision Records The part of a decision record that captures what was considered and dismissed and on what grounds - the only content that code, diagrams and current-state documentation cannot carry.
Relational Modelling practice Relational Modelling Designing a schema around entities, relationships and enforced constraints — still the correct default for most transactional systems.
Relationship-Based Access Control ReBAC, Graph Authorization concept Authorization Expressing permissions as relationships between subjects and objects, with inheritance and group expansion as rules over the graph, rather than as attributes on rows.
Release Ring pattern Progressive Delivery An ordered cohort of users a change reaches before the next one, chosen so that early rings would notice a fault and tolerate it.
Release Strategies pattern Release Strategies How new code reaches users — rolling, blue-green, canary, or flag-controlled — chosen by rollback speed and blast radius.